10 Best & Worst Presidents

There have been some great presidents throughout U.S. history. There have also been some less-than-great ones. Here are the 10 best and 10 worst presidents as ranked in 2010 by the Research Institute of Siena College, who have surveyed presidential scholars five times since 1982.

Benjamin Harrison

(credit: Wikipedia)

10th WORST

(23rd President, 1889-1893, Republican)

"I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process." -- Benjamin Harrison (1891)

Dwight D. Eisenhower

(credit: Wikipedia)

10th BEST

(34th President, 1953-1961, Republican)

"Eisenhower had about the most expressive face I ever painted, I guess. Just like an actor's. Very mobile. When he talked, he used all the facial muscles. And he had a great, wide mouth that I liked. When he smiled, it was just like the sun came out." -- Norman Rockwell

William Henry Harrison

(credit: Wikipedia)

9th WORST

(9th President, 1841-1841, Whig)
Harrison's ranking is likely more due to the fact that he died only one month into his term.

Harry S. Truman

(credit: Wikipedia)

9th BEST

(33rd President, 1945-1953, Democratic)

"I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they think it's hell." -- Harry S. Truman

Herbert Hoover

(credit: Wikipedia)

8th WORST

(31st President, 1929-1933, Republican)

"I outlived the bastards." -- Herbert Hoover, when asked how he dealt with people who blamed him for the Great Depression

Woodrow Wilson

(credit: Wikipedia)

8th BEST

(28th President, 1913-1921, Democratic)

"I do not know how to avoid the conclusion that a man who is capable of taking the illusions of religion so literally and is so sure of a special personal intimacy with the Almighty is unfitted for relations with ordinary children of men." -- Sigmund Freud

John Tyler

(credit: Wikipedia)

7th WORST

(10th President, 1841-1845, Whig)

"Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette - the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace." -- John Tyler (1816)

James Monroe

(credit: Wikipedia)

7th BEST

(5th President, 1817-1825, Democratic-Republican)

"If we look to the history of other nations, ancient or modern, we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy." -- James Monroe

Millard Fillmore

(credit: Wikipedia)

6th WORST

(13th President, 1850-1853, Whig)

"An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory." -- Millard Fillmore, after losing the Whig nomination for governor of New York (1844)

James Madison

(credit: Wikipedia)

6th BEST

(4th President, 1809-1817, Democratic-Republican)

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." -- "The Federalist Papers" (1788)

"George Washington is the only president who didn't blame the previous administration for his troubles." -- Author unknown

Warren G. Harding

(credit: Wikipedia)

3rd WORST

(29th President, 1921-1923, Republican)

"I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." -- Quoted by Nicholas Murray Butler (1939)

Abraham Lincoln

(credit: Wikipedia)

3rd BEST

(16th President, 1861-1865, Republican/National Union)

"He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion." -- Walt Whitman

James Buchanan

(credit: Wikipedia)

2nd WORST

(15th President, 1857-1861, Democratic)

"I am the last President of the United States!" -- Statement Buchanan reportedly made after the secession of South Carolina.

Theodore Roosevelt

(credit: Wikipedia)

2nd BEST

(26th President, 1901-1909, Republican)

"Roosevelt was a great personality, a great activist, a great preacher of the moralities, a great controversialist, a great showman. He dominated his era as he dominated conversations ... the masses loved him; he proved to be a great popular idol and a great vote getter." -- Thomas A. Bailey, "Presidential Greatness" (1966)

Andrew Johnson

(credit: Wikipedia)

1st WORST

(17th President, 1865-1869, Democratic/National Union)

"No man in Tennessee has done more than Andrew Johnson to create, to perpetuate and embitter in the minds of the Southern people, that feeling of jealousy and hostility against the free States, which has at length culminated in rebellion and civil war. Up to 1860, he had been for 20 years among the most bigoted and intolerant of the advocates of slavery and Southernism." -- The Nashville Press (February, 1863)

Franklin D. Roosevelt

(credit: Wikipedia)

1st BEST

(32nd President, 1933-1945, Democratic)

"The greatest thing he accomplished was to make people all over the world feel that he, and therefore our country, actually was concerned about them and was interested in their problems." -- Eleanor Roosevelt